I started using Google's RSS Reader yesterday and am currently being flooded with tons of news along with reddit and other funnies. Of particular interest (besides Fallout: New Vegas DLC comming to the PC, woot!) I saw this today: Google Vs. MS(Bing) (techcrunch.com) the nut of it is Google claims they caught Microsoft stealing Googles search results. Microsoft is claiming that users that have opted-in in IE to allow this, so it really wasn't stealing. Apparently there has already been twitter name calling and posts on their respective blogs. Should make for an interesting "fight"

One thing I did take away from this though, is check your settings! Programs like IE will have these things turned on automatically, with a small checkbox during the install that you have to uncheck to not allow data mining. I'm sure Google does the same thing with all their services as they have google-analytics and a couple of ad sponsoring agencies. This goes back to the geeky tech side of me in which i spout my love of Firefox and extension like Adblock Plus and NoScript. Noscript has lots of user interaction which not everyone will like, but AdblockPlus really does remove 90% of the ads on the Internet and has no interaction once installed and configured.

/end rant